AMD Ryzen Threadripper: The Fascinating Story Behind The Processor That Beat Intel

Although computer enthusiasts waited a decade for serious competition to Intel in the desktop processor market, 2017 saw not only AMD's successful mainstream Ryzen processors arrive in March, but also the company's first high-end desktop processor in the form of Threadripper too, which launched in August (see my review of them here).

AMD Threadripper

Antony Leather

In many ways, it's even more successful than Ryzen mainstream processors. For $1000, you get more cores and better performance in many tests with Ryzen Threadripper 1950X than Intel's equivalent and highest performing desktop CPU - Core i9-7900X. Where AMD is still a little slower, for example in some older or lightly threaded games, is less of an issue as many people will use Ryzen Threadripper purely for its multithreaded performance. It has to be said that there aren't many reasons to choose Intel in the high end desktop market at this price point.

The battle goes on, of course, with Intel due to release processors with even more cores over the coming weeks, but just where did this somewhat unexpected processor come from? It might surprise you to learn that Ryzen Threadripper wasn’t originally part of AMD’s plans, which back in 2015 only included Ryzen and the EPYC server CPU.

To delve deeper into Threadripper's origins, I spoke to some of AMD’s big guns as far as Threadripper was concerned; AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Jim Anderson along with Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Marketing John Taylor ,who have both been heavily involved in the Threadripper project; also Sarah Youngbauer of AMD’s communications team, plus James Prior, who’s AMD Senior Product Manager and closely involved in the Threadripper inception.

Forbes: What can you tell us about Threadripper origins and how it came to be?

Sarah Youngbauer:

There’s a unique story surrounding Threadripper, but one that gives testament to the spirit that’s emerging in the company as we go through this transition since 2014 when we announced our Zen architecture. It’s not really a story of roadmaps and long-term planning or huge R&D budgets - it’s a lot more personal than that and stemmed from a skunkworks project and a small group of AMD employees who had a vision of a processor they’d really want in terms of a high-performance PC.

They worked on it in their spare time and it was really a passion project for about a year before they sought the green light from management, which is quite unusual – it was something they really cared about. The result, several years later was Ryzen Threadripper, which is the world’s most powerful desktop processor. Without this group of people Threadripper may not have happened.

There are three AMD Threadripper models, spanning 8, 12 and 16 cores.

AMD

Forbes: James, you were part of the original team that came up with the idea. What’s your take on it?

James Prior:

Myself and a few others were in a very cross functional team that get together for various different projects and as we got the first hints of what the Zen core performance and efficiency were like and started looking at the internal roadmap, which is a constantly changing thing and noticed a gap between Ryzen and EPYC. Certainly, something that stood above Ryzen with more memory bandwidth, cores, PCI-E lanes. To get to this product, which sounded great to us as enthusiasts, we found we’d only have to change a few details. So we put together this skunkworks team where we had platform architects, people that deal with core design, business unit, marketing team, to work out how to use what’s already here and to go to the boss – Jim Anderson and say we’d like to do this. This was all happening in 2015.

There were lots of late nights, calls, Skype messages and between-meeting conversations where we’d see what progress was being made with Ryzen and EPYC that might be useful to Threadripper and quickly discuss ideas. The cardinal rule here was not to go against the grain. So the 20 or 30 of us spent more and more time working on it until eventually when Jim came on board from Intel and we found out he was an actual CPU enthusiast, this was perfect for taking the project forward.

My boss was sharing a taxi with Jim on the way to Computex 2016 and mentioned Threadripper to him then. He loved it, gave it the green light and found a way to get it on the roadmap. He believed in the idea, especially the way it leveraged existing technology we were using for Ryzen and EPYC, plus the fact as we were so excited about it that we’d already done a lot of the groundwork that would have been involved in the approval process anyway.

AMD's Ryzen Threadripper

Antony Leather

In fact, even though it was akin to a pet project up to this point and had no official business plan, the actual feasibility study that took place later concludes it was one of the best-planned products they’d seen in a long time. We’d been that passionate about it during those first few months so even though we were asking for an un-budgeted, un-scoped product to be added to the roadmap, he was willing to say yes to it. The feeling of validation from reading reviews in August was immense – so satisfying and we felt we really knew what the market needed. It was worth all the late nights and additional time we gave up during the initial stages.

Forbes: Jim, what was your reaction when you heard about their proposals?

I started at AMD in June 2015 and we were trying to get the graphics business accelerated, and in June 2016 James and his team brought this concept to me and said they’d been working on it in the background and said I might be interested. I thought it was fantastic! I was really blown away when we worked out we could actually build it – I came into the industry as a CPU architect and it was the kind of product I’d love to build.

I asked for two things – the specifications and also how quickly we could build it. I fell in love with it seeing the specifications, but the timeline was disappointing as it originally pointed at 2018 for launch. I immediately asked them to pull it in by about a year – so summer 2017.

They thought I was crazy, but what was really great is that they were passionate about the project. I’ve never actually told anyone this, but Threadripper never had a business plan – that might raise some eyebrows, but we were building it because we knew it was awesome, because we could and to make it best product we could, even the name had to be big. It’s certainly been one of the most fun products I’ve ever brought to market and I had a great time building a Threadripper PC with my son recently too.

Forbes: So, were Ryzen and EPYC the only two processors planned?

John Taylor:

That’s correct. The existence of the EPYC server CPU enabled us to create Ryzen Threadripper, but Threadripper was not part of the original 2017 AMD product roadmap. That only included the Ryzen 3, 5 and 7 ranges of 4, 6 and 8-core CPUs, plus versions of EPYC ranging from eight to 32 cores. Interestingly, some of the original team behind Threadripper joined AMD from the press, with a critical and appreciative eye for PC hardware from years of reviewing a wide range of products. This perspective was core to creating the Threadripper concept and product definition. It is very much a CPU made by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts. The story behind it hasn’t really been told before as we announced and launched Threadripper this summer in a very short period of time. Before May 2017, no one knew it existed, and by August it was in people’s hands, but it’s a very good example of the company AMD is today.

AMD Threadripper

Antony Leather

Forbes: There were obviously some key decisions made surrounding Threadripper and its launch, such as using the EPYC-size CPU socket and heatspreader. What were these, how do you think your technology allowed it to come together and what are AMD’s plans for its future?

Jim Anderson:

There were a lot of big decisions as I’m sure James and John will talk about in more detail, but one of the most stand-out for me, which is quite funny, is that I really wanted the retail packaging to be illuminated. Sadly, John and others told me the retail kits would miss the summer target I’d set if they included lighting, which was a shame so I had to give up on that, but as a compromise, the press kits were illuminated.

John Taylor:

Very true and a funny story. We really wanted to make the packaging better and different, though, then any prior CPU and do so for everyone who bought a Ryzen Threadripper, not just a special edition. We built a package for every Ryzen Threadripper CPU that befits the notion of unlocking overwhelming power. Then, with the press kits for reviewers, we went to town and delivered the illumination in a special case that lit up when reviewers opened the special case – all done on a very short timetable to make the August launch.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper dual CPU press pack

Antony Leather

We will continue to build products for the Ryzen Threadripper Socket TR4 platform, including the just-released Threadripper 1900X 8-core CPU. All of this is possible only through the adage “necessity is the mother of invention.” We needed a method to efficiently bring together AMD and industry standard blocks of processing IP, to enable us to do more with our R&D budget and focus it on our differentiating high-performance cores. The Infinity Fabric our engineering teams invented to accomplish that also lets us create products like Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC.

James Prior:

We started off working out how we could leverage the existing product definition for EPYC and turn it into something else. We also considered working on making a larger die, but that would have put the launch time frame back two years. There’s not really a better example of utilizing the advantage of Zen core and Infinity Fabric to connect them than Threadripper, especially when you consider the time to market advantage and cost advantage. It makes it so much easier to manufacture and to define as well as test.

The efficiency in manufacturing came from the fact that we didn’t need entire wafer runs just to produce Threadrippers, we could use Ryzens and that was the big key in Threadripper’s success. It meant we didn’t need millions of dollars for this one design; we found a way to use our existing great product and make it even more powerful. You can consider the resulting size of the CPU to be a negative aspect – the size of the socket, the heatspreader and number of pins, but it turns out it was a blessing in disguise. We could use the same socket as EPYC and just re-wire things. We’d already defined all the supply and ironed out the issues for EPYC, and this made it really easy to persuade our motherboard partners for example.

ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI all have Threadripper motherboards available

Antony Leather

Forbes: How did you decide on the features and specifications such as frequencies and memory access modes that can be configured in the Ryzen Master software?

James Prior:

Jim also wanted to make Threadripper the best of the best, which is why the CPUs have such high XFR speeds at 4.2GHz and the same all-core boost as the Ryzen 7 1800X, but on twice the number of cores. We’d also learned a lot about the impact of memory and latency on gaming, which is where the Ryzen Master software’s memory access modes come in. In testing different games, we found that leaving Windows to manage things would see tasks switch between each of the two dies in Threadripper CPUs. Some games used lots of threads, but even with games that didn’t this would still happen, and this introduced a degree of latency.

We looked at ways to constrain these tasks to an individual die and its two memory channels so you get the fastest possible memory access. In addition, some older games aren’t stable in any system with more than 10 cores or 20 threads so we wanted a way for those gamers to be able to run their games too. Similarly, some applications don’t always make use of more cores and threads so that’s why we introduced Legacy Mode, which actually disables one die to focus Windows and applications onto that single die for the lowest latency.

We also have the Local access mode, which keeps the second die active but fills up the local memory first, again lowering latency. So, this is where these modes came from. You don’t have to use these modes, of course, but we wanted to give people the option, especially those that want maximum gaming performance. You also have to reboot when you switch between them, but that’s because Windows really doesn’t like it when you start changing the core and thread counts on the fly – it’s not a limitation of Ryzen Master, but of Windows.

Game mode switches to local memory access mode as well as enabling Legacy Compatibility Mode, which cuts the core count in half to further boost gaming performance

Antony Leather

Forbes: The original roadmap obviously had quite a big gap between Ryzen and EPYC. Were there any other plans to launch a high-end desktop (HEDT) processor to compete with Intel here?

John Taylor:

If you go back a few years, our roadmap was focussed on building products like Ryzen 7 from our new Zen core, and we prioritized the desktop market for the first the simple reason that we felt enthusiasts had passionately waited for a new AMD high-performance desktop product for a long time. While Threadripper is a high-end desktop platform, Ryzen 7 was also designed to disrupt the HEDT market as its eight cores were only matched by Intel’s Core i7-6900K – an HEDT product.

However, we still left the leadership crown with Intel as it obviously had the Core i7-6950X, which is a 10-core product. AMDers like James and Jim realized that Infinity Fabric and the EPYC package allowed us to define a version of Ryzen that was even more powerful than Ryzen itself, and used the basics of the EPYC platform to take that ultimate performance crown.

As a result, I think we really surprised the industry, and while Intel has more CPUs coming in September and October, as we sit here today the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is the most powerful CPU made for the consumer market.

Forbes: I’ve been impressed not just with Threadripper’s performance, but also its memory compatibility and stability out of the box, which was much better than Ryzen’s launch. Some teething issues were to be expected of course, but you seem to have learned lessons here.

John Taylor:

There was a teeth-cutting that we were going to have to work through with Ryzen’s launch as the first all new CPU core and platform in some time – a whole ecosystem had to be built around the platform. However, we worked hard to solve the problems, blogged and posted consistently about our progress, and provided regular BIOS updates for motherboards. We built this work in Ryzen Threadripper from the start, so the product launched with a strong stable ecosystem and high-speed memory support.

AMD has launched the $549 Threadripper 1900X, -the cheapest CPU in the range, which is expected to be its last desktop CPU of 2017

AMD

Forbes: Where does Threadripper get its name from?

Jim Anderson:

Threadripper was just the projects code name, which we were using before we decided what the real name and branding would be. However, we all started to like the name and eventually we all started to like it. In the end, we got the necessary team to trademark it and that was that, but it’s unusual for a code name to be used as a product name like this.

John Taylor:

I think making Threadripper a separate version of Ryzen was the right idea too, rather than adding extra digits to the existing Ryzen naming scheme.

Threadripper timeline:

2014 – 2015: Work began on Threadripper concept, mostly in the initial team’s spare time and without a dedicated business plan

2016: The team presented the idea to Jim Anderson just before the Computex tradeshow who had joined from Intel the previous year. Loved the idea so much the launch timeline was cut to 18 months to be the same year as Ryzen and EPYC.

May 2017: AMD officially announces Threadripper, which comes mostly as a surprise to the press.

August 2017: Threadripper goes retail

I’d like to thank AMD for taking the time to talk to me about Threadripper and if you have any thoughts on AMD’s launches this year, Ryzen or Threadripper, feel free to comment below or reach out on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.